“Dr. Coburn is very good at getting into the weeds and trying to find something that he thinks makes sense, but I think we need to look at the overall context of this bill,” Reid said at a Thursday Senate press briefing. “It really brings a lot of people in from the cold so that they have the ability to get health insurance, which they’ve never had the opportunity [to do] before.”

Coburn is raising an issue that is playing out in top research hospitals around the country. “You know, it’s a market, and what they’ve done is they’ve priced it where these cancer centers, a lot of them, aren’t going to participate because they don’t get paid to cover the costs,” he said.

The nation’s top multi-campus cancer hospital The Mayo Clinic, which was cited by President Obama as a health reform model for the nation when promoting the law in 2009, now accepts only one kind of Obamacare insurance plan: the Blue Cross Blue Shield silver plan.

The Cleveland Clinic, a top-four U.S. hospital, is making $330 million in budget cuts this year, including more than $100 million in cuts that the hospital claimed was directly due to Obamacare, and projects a workforce reduction.

Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich spoke at the Cleveland Clinic late last year to present his plan to accept a full Medicaid expansion package under Obamacare. The health law raises federal Medicaid eligibility to 138 percent of the poverty level.

The federal government’s Medicaid reimbursements to hospitals are seen as a way for hospital interests to get a portion of their money back — prompting the hospital lobby to push hard with an effective multi-state pro-Medicaid campaign.